Italy Polls Show Bersani Need Alliance With Monti to Govern

Feb. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Democratic Party leader Pier Luigi
Bersani will probably win Italian elections this month, though
he will need an alliance with outgoing Prime Minister Mario
Monti to govern, the final polls of the campaign showed.

Bersani will win an outright majority in the Chamber of
Deputies, as his coalition maintains an average 6 percentage-point lead over former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s bloc,
five polls published today show. Still, he will fall short of a
Senate majority, which could force him to team up with Monti and
risk alienating ally Nichi Vendola, who labeled such a move
“suicide” for Bersani’s center-left coalition.

Italian law bans polling in the final two weeks of the
campaign to avoid influencing voters. The prohibition will mean
that Italians won’t be able to gauge whether Berlusconi’s surge
in the polls will continue in the final weeks. He trailed
Bersani by about 15 percentage points at the beginning of
January. Berlusconi’s gains have rattled investors, with the
country’s 10-year bond yield gaining 45 basis points in the past
weeks.

“Berlusconi has gained six points in four months,”
Roberto D’Alimonte, a professor of politics at Luiss University,
said on Twitter today. “To win the elections he needs to get
another 6 points in the coming two weeks. That’s very
difficult.”

All the polls today showed Bersani winning the popular vote
for the Chamber of Deputies, which means he will be given extra
seats through a bonus premium to grant him a majority in the
lower house. In the Senate, those bonus seats are doled out in
regional races, making it more difficult to build a majority.

Lacking Majority

Bersani’s bloc would get 146 senators in the Senate
including 11 senators of Vendola’s Left, Ecology, Freedom party,
or SEL, while Monti’s coalition would win 21 seats, SWG
Institute said in its poll today. Bersani would need both Monti
and SEL to assemble a 158-seat majority. Berlusconi’s gains are
making the Senate race even more unpredictable, with six
regions, including Lombardy, the biggest in terms of assigned
seats, considered swing areas, a Tecne poll for SkyTG24 showed
yesterday.

Vendola opposes many of the austerity measures passed by
Monti that helped tame Italy’s budget deficit and slash
borrowing costs, while saddling Italy with higher taxes and
contributing to the country’s fourth recession since 2001. Monti
has called on Bersani to “clip the extreme wings” of his
coalition in a reference to Vendola.

Palermo Prosecutor

An agreement with centrist parties supporting the prime
minister “is not possible because of the distance between the
policies of the center-left and those of Monti,” Vendola said
today, according to Ansa.

Former Palermo prosecutor Antonio Ingroia, who’s running
for prime minister at the head of the Civil Revolution party,
said today he would be open to a deal with Bersani after the
vote if Monti is excluded. Still, both polls of SWG and Ipsos
show his party is polling at around 4 percent or less, well
below the 8 percent threshold he needs to get seats in the
Senate.

The five polls published today reported about 30 percent of
undecided or abstentions. Bersani’s bloc may fail to assemble a
majority in the Senate even with Monti’s support if it loses
Lombardy, Piedmont and Campania, Tecne’s poll showed. Both the
SWG poll and Tecne’s excluded six seats for Italians abroad.